The text
of a talk given at parklands by Eugene Halliday, Ishval Audio 116

Track 1

Well
actually we are talking about the here and the now and in order to
define the here and now we must say what so far, philosophically,
has been said about a space and time, because here is a concept and
now is a time concept. And these two things cohere very nicely on a
piece of printed music. I’ll draw you up a little stave, five lines
with every good boy deserves a favour on them for those of you who
remember those and within the spaces FACE. It illustrates very
clearly the difficulty of the problem.

A piece
of printed music contained space and time, and the space is
represented, like most human inventions illogically, the wrong way.
But there is a very intelligent firm in Holland called klavar
schribel which means ‘piano writing’, writing for the keyboard
and they print the music the other way round at right angles to the
way orthodox people do it. And they do this because it is more
logical. If we were to put the base clef here, five more lines, I
won’t bother to do the rest, we’ll put a little line in the
middle called the ledger line and we call the ledger line between
there, middle there middle C, that is middle C, around the middle of
the piano, then we can see that if we were to turn the whole thing
round this way and do our five lines like this, we could look at this
stave very logically, we could print all the music this way round, we
could put this middle C opposite the key on the piano, to right or
left of that note on a line or in a space, and then we could
immediately play the music without having to learn music, because we
would then have a space diagram here representing the space of the
keys, and our time diagram we could use vertically. We could print
this on a rolling piece of paper, rather like this one and when we
had to play a certain note, we could pull that note out of the way
and play the next one, always play the one opposite the eye, and this
would enable us to play immediately any music, within the capacity of
our manual dexterity, at sight. This particular Dutch player,
inspired by the simplicity of Esperanto, applied the same simple
concepts and knowing tat this other the mode, the orthodox mode is
really a space-time diagram, they just turned it round. Anybody can
just read music immediately without any further lesson if they get a
piece if they get a piece of ordinary music and just turn it over, so
the lines are running vertically, and then take the little ledger
line between, put it opposite the middle C., and then count to right
or left of that note, and then play wherever there is a dot, put a
finger. Put it opposite the middle C and then count to right or left
of that note and play. Wherever there is a dot, put a finger, rather
like a ukulele used to be played in the old days and some guitar
music still is.

Now this
illustrates a peculiar relation that on the same diagram we can show
space and time.

Now I am
going to dismiss klavar scribel for a moment and ask you all to sit
for the next hour with your heads on one side like this so that you
can get the same effect as you would get with the klavar-scribel
writing but with a pain in the neck. You will find that this teaches
you another thing about time that time always means energy
expenditure, because you neck muscles will get tired and if you try
to hold your head in that position for very long it will begin to
ache. This is quite an important thing that time involves energy
expenditure.

Track
2

Now
let’s think about it, now that we have a space diagram here and a
time diagram this way. When you are playing music you will turn your
pages over this way and that’s probably easier than turning them
over that way as they would tend to fall down again. But you have
bars to divide the thing and you put, say in a waltz you have three
beats, and you write those beats, we will say, like that, I shall
shade them in. there are three crochets for you and we will count 1,
2, 3, and we might repeat that to reverse it 1,2,3, for the next bar.
And we can imagine that if we put a finger on this note and then a
finger on this note and then and then a finger on this note and so
on, this direction represents time and this direction represents the
space. We put a finger on E, a finger on G, a finger on B, the
same finger on B, and then the finger we put on G there we put on G
here, and the finger we put on E there we put on E here. And we are
doing two things, spreading our fingers in space over the keyboard
and we are counting time. We might find on a piece of music, sixty
here with crochets = ( = 60) and that means you will count one
second per crochet, sixty to the minute. Supposing we do this, one,
two, three, one, two three, we have now taken six seconds to play six
notes and in so doing we have expended a certain amount of energy.
Now supposing I put little tails on these and alter the time and say
I am going to have three/eight instead of three/four, I am going to
have three quavers and instead of saying 1,2,3, I am going to say
123, 123. in other words I am going to play them in half time. Now to
do this I have to concentrate a bit more to get more energy into the
explication of that music. I have to put energy down my arm.
Supposing I put two tails on them, now I have got to play them twice
as quick again. If I put three tails I am going to have to expend
more energy, more alertness and go ( …, … )

Did
somebody jump then?

When I do
this, I expend energy and if I put lots of little lines on and then
put at the beginning of the music, terribly, awfully very fast by
request of the composer, then we can very, very hot when we are doing
it. We might do this when we are pretending to be petunias in the
Children’s Hour and rush rapidly about the room, with somebody
saying, “And don’t forget to plant yourself in every little hole
when you come to it. Now this makes the children very hot.

Now we
can put hemi, demi, semi, hemi semi, demi quavers, punct drawled
tremor when we try to do it. In other words if I start trying to keep
up with the conceivable notes………

Actually
there is a very clever fellow in the next world, he left this world a
few years ago, Simon Bahrraer and he could play that kind of piano
music perfectly, with every note clear and articulated correctly, and
phrased far better than anyone else I have heard, but he was
expending energy. And we must bear this in mind, we have space, time
and energy expended. This allows us to analyse the music in terms of
space, time, power. Here is the space, this way is the time, and the
amount of energy you use in hitting each note, called by the
musicians the dynamic, means how hard do you strike it. You make
strike a note very, if you are doing a very comic type of German
waltz, you do a waltz like 123,123, 123 you
strike the first note very strongly and the other two less strongly.
If you are doing four in the baar you strike the first one strongly,
the third one not quite as strongly, the second one less strongly and
the fourth one least strongly. If you count your four with all the
notes equally, counting one two three four, one, two, three, four
with no stress accent on them, you are squaring your music. Now
beginners in conducting are often told not to beat squarely in this
way. We have to remember that we are expending energy through time
over space.

Track
3

Now let
us consider what we have to say about time. Here is the word time,
and we see that it reads in the opposite direction, emit. This is a
reference to the energy that is released every moment by any
existential observer of time. In other words you cannot observe time
without releasing energy moment by moment. So time, as experienced by
human beings depends on energy emission by those human beings.

If you
don’t emit any energy at all from your central energy store,
through the brain, down certain nerves to certain organs, then you
will not perceive anything. If you become abstracted in your inner
processes you do not send energy to your external sense organs but
you do send energy from your brain centres to specific memory storage
placed to energise memory images. You do this in dreams and in
dreamless sleep you do something else. But you are still expending
energy as long as you exist.

Now we
see that the problem of space and time is related in this way. The
musical notation and the staves show us a very simple representation
of it. But now let us look at another thing.

If I look
down the room from where I am, I am over here and the rest of the
room is like this, and a lot of people over here, now I cannot with
this physical eye focus sharply on a very large area. It is quite a
small area that I focus on. So I am going to imagine that I am
looking at this group of people like this, but only a very narrow
channel of vision is in focus and the rest of it here is more or less
out of focus. There is one part of the eye that will hold
everything in very, very sharp focus and right on the periphery of
the eye and the rest of the eye is not so sharply focussed and right
on the periphery of the eye it is very much out of focus, but it has
a peculiar quality. The part that is most closely in focus gives me
the sharpest formal definition at the expense of making the image
static. You can experiment in your spare time with this. But where
you are sharply in focus and can define the form accurately, there
the thing is static; but where the periphery is, where you are vague,
you are very conscious of movement So if some obliging people start
wiggling about or being irritated or scratching or turning their
heads, my eye is very aware of the movement but with no sharp formal
focus. This has a survival utility value for animals and for human
beings because your periphery being wired to movement detection
centres in the brain means that any moving object that is out of
focus will attract your attention and you will be able to become
aware of that as a potential threat to existence or a potential point
of interest and you can then rapidly switch your eye to it to see if
it is a danger potential or a delight potential. And if it is a
matter of no moment to you, you can turn back and continue your focus
elsewhere.

Now this
is very important because we are going to talk about the here and the
now and how important it is. Remember important means we are
importing our energies into the time-space-power situation.

If I
deliberately don’t focus on any particular person, by putting my
eyes not focussed on anybody in particular, I am still aware of the
crowd of people there, but I can’t see at the moment and particular
features because I am focussed on the point in the air, and I am busy
watching the little movement of the molecules of air in so far as
they interfere by their peculiar refractive index, with the light
display. And when I do this so that I comprehend the whole room’s
content in this one moment by not focussing. Then, if I focus on a
particular person sharply and keeping a sharp focus, I want to look
at the rest of the room I must scan. So if I look at Sal in one
second and want to see sharper in focus to compare her with Abel.
Why I should do this I don’t know, I must now turn my eye and look
at Abel sharply in another second, and then at Claire, who is sitting
very upright and this takes me three seconds. And when I do this, for
the time being I have lost formal consciousness of the remainder of
the people in the room and they have all become blurred. But if they
move, I will become aware of the movement and I may take a quick flip
to see who is moving, and why, or I might ignore it according to the
character of the movement. If it is a curvaceous movement and not
sudden staccato and not straight line-ish, I will not normally
interpret it as aggression, but it could be, if he is a very cunning
person. He may know that a fox will walk round a field to catch a
rabbit in curves which do not startle, gradually reducing the
diameter of its circle, until it is walking round the rabbit within a
foot. And the rabbit has watched it like this, and because there was
no straight, aggressive line it has not been scared. So we must allow
the possibility that a curvaceous mover over there might be
curvaceously throwing a boomerang. Still we don’t expect it here so
we can statistically ignore it.

Now
observe, that when I expend energy in sharp focus on one thing, I
exclude for the time being, a sharp focus on the rest of reality and
in order to see another thing in equal sharp focus I must turn my
eyes and the turning of my eyes takes time.

Track
4

Now let
us draw this. Supposing here is a lady, you can always tell a lady,
that’s a lady, and here is a gentleman. Now observe that if you
focus on this one, this one goes relatively out of focus, and if you
decide to compare that one with this and look at this, then that one
goes relatively out of focus. But you can retain an image of this in
your memory and overlap it with this one in your memory and thus
compare them. If they were exactly congruent, there would be no
difference in the images and there would be little point in making
the comparison.

Now
observe another thing, that these two occupy different spaces just as
surely as the different notes on the musical stave occupy different
spaces. So this again is a space-time diagram. If I were to say that
is the note E and that is the note G, then I would say I will spend
one crochet time looking at that one and the next crochet in that
one, but there is a gap between.

Now it
takes time to turn my eye from this curly-headed lady, through space
to contemplate this straight headed gentleman, so that I am looking
at the A figure, then the space, then the B. This is very important
in music because it means I have got to come in at A and then at B.
at a certain point in time, I must cut my A’s end off a bit to
allow me time to traverse the space to get onto B. And I can stretch
the space a little bit, delay the B, or I can shorten the spaces,
anticipate the B and sensitively to this kind of thing often makes
the difference to good and bad phrasing.

Track
5

Now, let
us use the story of the little fellow who is up from the country,
with a plum-coloured, long hairy suit on, this is a real person I am
describing, and he comes up from darkest Staffordshire. He comes up
once in three months and his pocket is fat with his wallet, and he
goes into some place of amusement, and he is looking around, very
slowly, in a manner like an old-fashioned bucolic, now very rare; and
there is a little weasel gentleman with a sharp nose and very sharp
eyes, with a partner of course, and this bucolic gentleman is looking
very slowly at all these unfamiliar things because the pace of his
mentation, his mental process, is relatively slow, because in the
environment from which he comes, change is slow. But, in the city
environment of these little pick-pockets, changes are quicker and
they get more practice. Also, their peculiar occupation helps them to
accelerate their rate of perception, so they actually perceive more
percepts per second than he does.

So they
see that he has come in, with his long, hairy suit on, actually. They
look at his boots, they look at his slow way of looking round, they
see his fat pocket, they see him pat it slowly and reassuringly and
they quickly work out he has been saving up. They think very quickly
at their course of campaign, A says to B, “You nip round the other
side, bump into him accidentally, apologize and start straightening
his coat for him and while you are doing this on the one side I will
go to the other side and remove his wallet.” Now they are putting
in more percepts per second into their activity, than he is.

So in
Christ’s terminology they are what is called “quick” and in
Christ’s terminology he is called “dead.” That is to say he
has a relatively static and slow-paced mental process.

Now let us see what this means in relation to the here and now.
Supposing I am a very, very slow thinker and I look at this curly
headed lady and focus her and this gentleman now goes out of focus
and he is one of these quick fellows, he knows he is out of focus
because I am focussed on this curly-headed lady, in fact he put the
curly headed lady there in order for me to focus on her, to divert my
attention. While I am gazing at this curly-headed lady, he is quickly
making up his mind what to do about certain schemes of his. When I
focus sharply on her I narrow my consciousness down to traverse the
form I am looking at, and I temporarily go out of focus for the rest.
If he moves smoothly and curvaceously and non-aggressively, he is
likely to go unnoticed, so that with this interesting object here I
am totally absorbed and totally focussed and made unaware of the
surrounding situation. And let us call this a ‘Now’ in which I am
focussed on her. In this ‘now’, I have a purpose, I am emitting
energy, I must have purpose, I must emit energy, otherwise I don’t
see her. To see is to emit energy and to have a purpose. This is
tremendously important because the amount of energy and the
characterisation of that energy depends upon my purpose. So that, if
I see interesting things, interesting means in accordance with my
purpose, a thing cannot be interesting unless it seems to fulfil part
of my purpose. To be interested is simply to see a possibility of the
fulfilment of a purpose. Let us call that a ‘now’, but observe
that the lady herself has a certain width of skull, so that when I
sharply focus on the right hand curl of Sal and then decide that I
will compare it with the left hand curl I have to traverse the width
of the face. So we are going to use a technical term for this and we
will write it down for those people who cannot see, and we are going
to say that all experienced events are protensive.

Now protensive means that they are stretched in time. They have
duration. This is very, very important because a protensive event, an
event is the actual process of perception, a protensive event is
taking time for me to perform it, and if I perform this very, very
slowly another being might be performing some other less protensive
event of his own, in which case I am at a disadvantage.
Philosophically, all our experience is based on protensive events. We
are seeing things extended in space and time. It takes time to see
space, so that we cannot separate space and time and the energy that
we expend in perceiving them. Space, time, power we must think of as
a trinity. Do not think of power being expended except through time
on a given space.

Track 6

When the Ancients saw the external world, they ordinarily saw it
protensively. That is to say they took time to travel along the tiger
from the tail end to the jaw end. And if you can imagine a man who is
focussed on a tiger’s tail sticking up out of the bamboos and it is
going like this and he is looking at it, and then going slowly along
like these folk do to the other end and at the other end, aaangh.
Now into his protensive experience he gets a little shock. How did
he know, with his protensive mode of protection that that little bit
of wiggling stuff had a tiger on the end; he didn’t. Now many men
were lost through extended experience of this type.

And it still happens. If you have got a pussy cat and it hasn’t
been trained to be a vegetarian, that means no pussy cat, and you
observe it in the garden, stalking a bird it will often flatten its
body onto the ground and creeping very slowly along will pause at
particular intervals and erect its tail and bend the tip of it like
this. And when it does it, the birdies look up and they see…. And
the birdies go ( whistles) and then something jumps on them.

This is part of what Christ said, “I can’t tell you everything
just now, but when the Holy Spirit comes he will enlighten you.” St
Paul called it strong meat not fit for babies.

Now, some other men long ago called Chaldeans, or White Judges, they
said this protensive kind of experience isn’t the very best surely
there is a better method than this that we can devise so they said
let us take any percept that is extended over time and practise
turning our heads very quickly and see how quickly we can get a sharp
focus on both ends of the tiger, that is on Sal and Claire one of
them is the tail and the other is the jaw and we are not giving away
which. Now the Chaldeans said let’s divide this protensive occasion
and concentrate on the first half and put more energy into it and see
if we can’t quickly focus, focus, focus and do this in one and a
half crochets instead of three. And then, let us practise again and
let us practise again and again. Now you can see what is happening,
if we keep on halving this protensive event, our moment of sharp
focus is getting smaller and smaller and smaller.

Now what we want to know is, is there a limiting factor to this
process of intensification of observation. Now we know, that in the
nervous system of a human being, as of animals in general, a percept
involves the release of energy quanta. Nervous impulses have to dash
from one place to another, from a brain centre along the optic nerve
and so on to a certain destination, they must go, so how quickly can
we persuade those nervous impulses to travel? Now their rate of
propagation to a nerve after much examination has been considered, by
some thinkers, to be more or less fixed. Others doubt this. The
different speeds in the reaction of certain animals, suggests that
there must be some other factor at work under certain critical
situations. For instance you may be having a protensive walk,
shop-walking. looking in large windows, slowly panning your eyes over
the goodies, and you might suddenly see in the reflection in the
window, a large lorry mount the kerb and proceed to dash rapidly
towards that same window, and at that moment, warned by the linear
quality of the motion of that lorry, that it is aggressive by your
peripheral motion awareness you suddenly leap out of the way, if
you are lucky.

Track 7

Now we are going to put that word lucky down because it is related to
another word. We will come to that in a moment. When you intensively
perceive with the deliberate intent of shortening the gap between
percepts, your activity is intensive, you expend more energy in that
moment and you are moving towards this limiting factor in your
nervous system. You can see what will happen at a certain point and
anybody who has actually played a musical instrument will know that
in practising very rapid passages, often a saturation point is
reached where the muscles are blocked so they cannot release the
energy quick enough to redo the act. So that I put my fingers down on
a note and I have to pick it up again to strike it again, every time
I pick it up to get the necessary height to attack it with the force
I want, it takes time to lift it up, now if I want to get it down
again I have to fire another nerve impulse at certain muscle groups
to put it down and if I fire them to quickly it hasn’t got time to
up in order to come down. The result is a feeling of blockage, an
actual impedance of action by the very nervous impulses that are
aiming at increased efficiency. Once upon a time, not very long ago
it was believed in aeronautics, that there was a sound barrier and
that planes could not fly through it. Again there was an impedance if
in generating its own resistance but after certain redesigning and
rethinking mathematically and so on they broke the sound barrier.
It has been said there is a light barrier and that bodies cannot
travel fast enough than a hundred and eighty six thousand two hundred
and forty miles per second this remains to be seen in future.

Men are always setting up barriers and their sons, like all sons do
with fathers, break them. Now the question arose, are we committed to
a limit of intensification for accelerated perceptions so that there
is a certain decisive point where we cannot get faster. Now this
greatly intrigued the Chaldeans. They had divided time up now into
moments that were so small that ordinary people thought these moments
didn’t exist. Now this meant to say that the great White Judge
could actually take advantage of his slower brother, because he could
perceive more in less time.

Now those of you who are engineering students will know that you talk
about a moment in engineering terms and you mean by it the point in
time where a change of direction of motion occurs. So that, if I had
a lever there, balanced on a fulcrum, and I put a weight on there and
I press it with my finger here, I can balance this weight with my
finger, and then if I press down a bit harder, at a certain point, my
end will go down and the weight will go up. Now the precise point
where that change occurs, is a moment, using the word
technically, a moment. So a moment then is a portion of time in which
a change is induced. Now moments therefore are terribly important,
because only in a moment can you change your mind. This means only in
a moment have you any initiative; only in a moment are you free.

Now it is usual in philosophy to treat moments as abstract ideas and
protensive events as real. So the moment is only an abstraction of
the intellect made by theoretically subdividing a protensive event.
That is an event with a degree of time duration but it was suggested
that maybe, if you crammed it hard enough and impeded yourself, on
this time line, you might put so much energy into it that a totally
new mode of perception might emerge, and we will represent this one
by an arrow going at right angles to the time one.

Track 8

Remember we are thinking about a very tricky subject. It is generally
accepted that it is possible to conceive all historical events in the
World on a single line. That is we can draw a line and we can write
ten sixty six on it and twelve fifteen, you know these dates, those
of you who are lovers of Tchaikovsky will know at least one date, and
we can write these dates on one single line, and this we will call
time. And there is a passive acceptance by people in general, that
all temporal events, fall on this line, and that at any given moment,
a living person is observing a portion of that time line and if we
are up to nineteen fifty eight here, we are observing here, and all
the beings we are observing before we were born and who are now no
longer with us, are considered by us to be non-existent simply
because our mode of perception is narrowed down to now, and our now
is nineteen sixty eight.

If we go back to consider this idea we will see if we put time in
this manner and then try to draw the orbit of the Earth on a single
time line and the orbit of Venus and Mercury, and the Sun, because
the Sun also has an orbit, and the orbits of Mars and Jupiter and
Saturn and so on, if we try to draw all these motions on one line we
will find it is rather difficult. We could do it with a kind of
wiggly line or we could do it with a kind of spiral line going all
through the infinities of space if we counterfeit. I mean we can do
it theoretically, we really haven’t the time to do it actually but
we can think that we could do it if we lived long enough, we could
draw that line. But that line is not a straight line. We cannot draw
the time events of the Earth on a straight line as anybody knows who
flies from London to New York and then from New York to London and
because the Earth is rotating one way, time going and time coming
are not quite the same, and because the Earth is spinning on its
axis, and going round the Sun, the Earth line is already quite
complex made more so by the fact that the whole Solar system is
travelling through space, so when we tend to think about time as on a
single line, we are really just over-simplifying the situation for
our own convenience. Now we can do this for our own convenience, when
we are going to one particular place, we can deliberately say, well
this is what is called an hour’s journey from A to B, I want to go
to B and be, there at eight so I will start at seven and deliberately
draw an imaginary time line an then go to it.

But a peculiar thing about this time line is, that its spatial
equivalent, the actual journey we travel, is not a straight line at
all. Not only because along the roads which the car travels are not
straight but because the Earth itself is spinning, and travelling
round the Sun, and the Sun round another place. But nevertheless, it
is customary in general Western Philosophy to say it is generally
accepted by philosophy that all the temporal events of the Universe
can be theoretically written on one line and placed and dated on that
line. But the same philosophy said this means the time is much easier
to deal with than space because space cannot be represented on one
line, it requires three lines at right angles to each other. Space is
three-dimensional and by the previous view, time is only
one-dimensional. It is therefore said it is easier to think about
time because space has two extra dimensions. Now this can only be
arrived at by deliberate simplification of a highly complex thing.

Track 9

Now we are coming to the important part of all this, what do we mean
by here and what do we mean by now. We are going to deal with space
and time, and we are writing here and now. Now, when we say “now”
we are using a statement that really means I an observer am emitting
energy to my organs of perception. A “now” only exists when I
emit energy from my energy store to an organ of perception and so
stimulate it. All now therefore depends upon the fact that we
are emitting energy. Now what do we mean by “here?” This is
rather trickier because now what it means is the locus in which the
observer himself exists.

So I am going to draw for here a circle and I am going to put an I in
it, because the observer is talking about his own immediate
environment when he says “here.” And if he is asked to say
precisely what does he mean by ‘here’ spatially, he will have to
say, “Where I am.” So my here, for me is right in the centre of
my observing consciousness, and if I refer to Margy on the back row,
I call her there relative to my body, my observation post although I
would say she is here within this room. I call here “here”
providing she is within my observed environment.

If I prefix this with a T and make this into there, then I must write
the T on the periphery of my awareness. A ‘there’ is a here for
another being that I have peripheralised.

So if I look at Margaret this time, she looks as if she is looking,
she looks as if she is listening and because of certain similarities
in her expression and mine, by analogy, on a purely materialistic
hypothesis, I could infer, that she is feeling more or less,
according to the principle of the common touch, more or less like I
would be feeling, if I had that kind of expression on my face and I
were not kidding. And I would say, because she is now on the
periphery of my field of observation, then I will prefix the here
which belongs to her, with a T to mark the periphery of my
observation, and I will say, “She is there.”

The fundamental idea is this, H is an old glyph, written in Egyptian
like a thrice twisted cord, and anciently like a ladder, and it means
power and it means hierarchy, and it means levels of possibility.
Now this is tremendously important, because you never make a decision
in the whole of your life, about anything, except in a here and now.
That means, the here means a power situation, with the power
differentiated into different beings. If I can see the
differentiations of power in the here, and then I emit energy, that
is, create a ‘now’, if I emit my energy onto a particular part of
that here, a moment occurs. Remember a moment means a change. But
when I emit energy, and thus create a ‘now’ into a ‘here’,
that is a differentiable power situation, I create a moment. A moment
means a new orientation.

Now we can begin to see why all the sages say, “Live in the here
and now.” That is in a full, sharp intensive awareness of the
differences of power in all the beings presented within your field of
experience. Just for laughs you can notice that ‘now’ spells the
word ‘won’, victory, backwards. Remember every man that has
ever been called great in the History of the human race, has had one
quality and one only, in common with every other great man. Their
noses are different lengths, some go up, some go
down, some are thin, some are broad, all these things differ.
Napoleon, Hitler, Genghis Khan, Stalin, Trotsky, all these men have
different shapes but they have one thing in common and this thing
they never wrote about in their works although it was factually a
basis of their whole dynamic approach to life. They always lived in
the here and now. That is, they are always looking at the power
differentiations presented in that situation in which they were
emitting energy. So they were momentary figures, we call them
momentous occasions when these men enter. When these men enter it is
a moment in History, there is a reorientation.

Any person who cannot get in the here and emit energy in the now, is
at the mercy of any other person who cannot get in the here and
now. Some people think this is a very hard doctrine. It is a very
hard doctrine, we’re not going to deny it. We are not even going to
say we hope it isn’t true. We just have to accept that it is true,
that there is a real difference of power in every being, and even
within the same being at different moments of life, and under
different physical and mental states. A person has a certain amount
of available energy in one mood, and by a verbal trick that person
might be made to become depressed and the energies he had five
minutes ago might be now unavailable to him. This is a fact;
political manipulation depends upon this fact, that a certain
manipulation of sound symbols, called words can produce high morale
or low morale.

Track 10

Let’s come back now. Imagine that the whole Universe is extended
three dimensionally, and we are going to say that the event that
happened a few moments ago when we were talking, took place when the
Earth was in a place but now it is not, because whilst we are
talking, the Earth is moving. Every event is taking place as well as
time. Monday the earth is in a certain position relative to the Sun
and the other planets, the next day Tuesday it has moved round a
portion of its orbit round the sun, a one hundredth, three hundred
and sixty five and a quarter, and in a week it has done roughly
fifty- twoth of its distance, so that every event in the Universe
happens not only in time but also in a specific location within time.
So it is rather naïve to think that time is on a single line, as
philosophy suggests, and that we can actually place events on that
single line and assume that the past now, in nineteen sixty eight,
has no spatial reality simply because we are not focussing upon it.

There is a law in physics today, the law of the conservation of mass
energy and the same law, logically extended will include the
patternings of that energy in their total permutations, which means
that every event that has ever happened, and is now happening, not
only in this room, but in Tokyo, Vietnam, the Bowery, every event is
taking place in its own locus and the whole system of the Earth is
leaving each locality, moment by moment so that the place where it
then occurred is still vibrating. We cannot imagine that the Earth is
in one position, vibrating as it is with its molecular vibrations,
its atomic vibrations, its Field vibrations, and it is vibrating in
the position called Monday, and that on Tuesday, the position that
was Monday has now stopped vibrating or is totally unconditioned by
the vibratory pattern of the Earth in that place we call Monday. This
means that all past events are still existing in their own places.
But it also means another funny thing. All future events are
likewise, are existing, waiting in their specific localities for
the specific planet to catch up with them to participate and respond
to, a stimuli of those total vibratory patterns of that locus. It
means all time past and present and future, is a function of an
Absolute here-now.

Remember the size of the Observer is always greater than the
observed. Every event that any individual perceives, is perceived by
him as a content of his consciousness. The content is always smaller
than the consciousness, so the consciousness of an individual human
being is greater than any defined object he may possess and the
consciousness of a group of human beings, a nation or of the human
race, or of the animal world or the vegetable world, the
consciousness of the totality of those beings is greater than the
total content of all those beings. And if we apply this logically,
strictly we will go back to the simple observation that consciousness
itself is infinite, and that only the content of consciousness is
finite. Now this is what the Chaldeans were chasing.

If the mind tends to serialise, protensively, and to make events, and
by practice can cut them down smaller and smaller, we can come to
a point where we get total impedance of percepts. Now this is very
interesting. It means that if we perceive quickly enough, and pack a
sufficient number of percepts into a moment, the smallest moment
there is, the Universe is solid percept, that space itself is solid.
It is a very peculiar thing that physics today is not unaware of,
that there is no empty space in the naïve sense, that space is
power, that space-power-consciousness, the emission of energy from
place to place, the generation of time, that all these leave no thing
whatever within the infinite with any voidity at all, that reality
that reality is absolutely solid to the conscious that perceives at
its optimum rate.

Track 11

Now this means that that consciousness will not see the Universe
serially at all, it will see it one-ly.

And you know the title of Christ, “The only Begotten.” Here is
the word, that is a G. this word means one-ly generated, “The
one-ly generated” (GENERATED), instead of “The Only Begotten,”
notice here how this can totally mislead people. If religionists of
the past have, for some reason of the difficulty of explaining what
‘one-ly generated’ means, have substituted ‘only begotten’
and then fallen into saying that because Christ is only begotten
therefore there is only one of him in the Universe, and therefore all
the other beings are inferior to his representatives on Earth, we
have to say we have to restate the original meaning of the term.

The original meaning is that if you are fast enough, remember Christ
is talking about the quick, and he said it himself, “If you go to
my Father greater works than these shall you do.” He was just doing
a few odd relatively easy miracles like Lazarus-raising and things
like that. Well there are cleverer things than that. And he was
saying “Go to the generative power and become a one, a proper one
by so increasing your rate of perception that instead of becoming
protensive you become super intensive, until suddenly the Universe
for you is seen as a block with no seriality whatever. It is a block
of power infinite. That power is sentient and only when that power is
viewed finitely, as emitting energy from one place to another, does
the concept of serial time apply. But when you take this highly
intensive mode of perception and insist, in-sist within yourself in
attaining it, you come to this unific total grasp of reality and this
total grasp of non-serialisation infinite being called eternality.
When you are talking about eternity and time in opposition, what you
are meaning is the non-serial and the serial. Eternal means
non-serial, total reality, non-serial. No voidity, full of power.
And, remember power is actual, so that ultimate reality is absolute
actuality so it has none of the qualities of the solidity of a gross
material object in the time process like a lump of lead, but it has
something far more solid than that, so solid, and there is no voidity
in it whatever and no possibility of a serialisation at that level
but only a total and absolute grasp of whole, infinite significance.

Track 12

Now we can see the value of the here and now because the only way to
get to total comprehension of a situation is by high powered,
intensive perception, high powered, intensive feeling evaluation,
high powered, intensive, volitional activity, simultaneously, in the
moment. Now every person is making decisions continuously whilst they
are alive. They don’t know it, they are even making decisions about
whether to breathe in or out or not at a given second. They think
these things are conducted for them by a process called instinctive
or reflex action, because they have been taught so by the biologists
and others. But, in fact, every breath is a decision to persist in
life and every failure of a breath is a decision to get out, and the
mind of a protensive thinker is vacillating from moment to moment.
One moment he feels like living and he breathes, the next moment he
remembers a depressing appointment and his breathing changes.

There is a remarkable inter-penetration of the energies that beat the
heart, that control the breathing, that determine the release of
nervous energies through the system. So here and now is tremendously
complex. Most people, when we say, “Think in the here and now,”
most people think there is nothing in the here and now of any
interest. Interest was last week when we nearly got to the Opera
House, but the traffic block and the rain and the fog turned us back.
Now that would have been interesting. Or there is next week, the
circus is coming to town, but nothing is happening here and now of
any moment. Now what could be more unfortunate, to think that you
could make a decision last week, in retrospect, - or next week,
before you arrive. The only place any being, from God downwards, has
ever made a decision, ever initiated an act, ever solved a problem,
ever been momentous is in a here and now.

Track 13

We will now go on to the practical aspect of this. How do we get into
the here and now?

There is only one reply to this, the answer is by doing it, by
practising it, by remembering every moment this principle, that
decision is here and now, not somewhere else. Not yesterday or last
week, not tomorrow or next year, but now. And that, if you do not
become conscious in the here and now of this fact that decision is
only possible here and now, then you are actually at the mercy of all
prior decisions of yourself and the rest of the human race and the
totality of forces in the Universe.. Either you free yourself in a
here and now by your highly intensive self-observation or you are at
the mercy of the mass inertia of your previous decisions that were
made vaguely and protensively and the decisions of all the other
people who helped you build your environment before you were born,
and the rest of the Cosmic Forces. So, only in that here and now can
you increase the value of life.

Of course the Ancients joked about this by saying let us take this
symbol and define it for our children and if they can solve the
riddle, they deserve to get the benefit. Here and now, this is a word
HAN, which means grace. It occurs in the name Hannah, it means grace,
but this grace can only operate in the here and now. That is nobody
is free, except in the moment. Remember moment means the point of
time and place when you emit energy, release energy into that
situation and thereby change forever your attitude to total reality,
Grace means Han here and now and here and now means grace. The G
there means the solid block of total reality, and the lowest level,
the gross material earth; the race is the time and the
extension through time of the manifestations of Absolute Power. The R
means the ruling tendencies of the differentiating power of that
moment and the ace means the same exactly as the ace in a pack
of cards.

Now a pack of cards derives from a highly important symbology and was
simplified to keep the people happy so that they wouldn’t try to
get grace. But the rules were kept intact and in a game where you
employ a pack of cards. You will find that in many of the games, and
as a basic of card playing, ace can be either above the king or at
the bottom of the pack. You can say ace high, above the king, ace
low, one finite individual. The reason is that ace means spirit,
spirit infinite, ace high, he is above the king he does not have to
accept the definition of mere kings because he knows that their
definition is a finite process, the king exactly means to define, to
limit and thereby to impose on other beings and thereby to rise above
this definitional trick is to be ace high. But not to know that you
are a spirit and that SP equals Sentient Power, is to be ace low,
that is to be a individual who can be and is frequently treated as a
material particle in the corporate existence of living being as a
particle, because of lack of awareness of its own central power of
decision, is passive to the decisive activities of other beings
higher up the hierarchy of self knowledge.

Track 14

So we will finish this short dissertation about the mystery of here
and now and space and time by saying those who want to understand
this thoroughly, let then take the world han, and write on a
postcard, and keep it in their handbag or wallet or wherever they can
find a convenient place to put it, let them, if they can do it by
leap of faith, accept that whatever else they may think they may
discover in the future, it will never be discovered other than in a
then here and now. And that the point of decision here and now to
write that nemonic and to refer to it mentally, write this law of
grace in your minds and in your hearts, that is understand it with
your mind and love it with your heart. And then this grace will begin
to operate as a control function, throwing out every lesser concept
that would otherwise impede you. Focus in here and now. Learn to
focus and shift quickly and remember when you look at a specific
object and focus on it, the rest tends to go out of focus, and when
you change to look at another thing, deliberately practise
remembering the one you have looked at, sharply, and superimpose it
on the new thing you are looking at and put them both in sharp focus
and see if they are congruent

Do this as an actual exercise and then aim to increase your rate of
perceptions so that you get more percepts per second, so that you
become more intensive. A very good way of practising this is to make
yourself, when reading a book, read faster than you can, with full
intensity, actually push yourself through that reading. You can soon
feel the difference. If you get a sentence, “Like as the waves
move towards the pebbled shore,” and expression like that, and you
deliberately focus on each word as you do it and grasp the meaning of
it and force yourself on to the next word retaining the meaning of
the first word and do it until you get hot. And this is the only way
you can become intensive – except as another way.

But the other way is harder. The other
way is to sit down and do nothing, strike serial thinking out of your
mind with one blow. That is called the sudden school. Sounds easier,
sit down, no serial thinking, all gone – you have now arrived.
Better to do it the hard way.

You take the high road and I’ll take the low road.

When a musician, playing a serious piece of music, think of what he
has to do. He has not only got to see a key signature and a number of
sharps and the time and the notes he has to continually remember
these things. And when he is playing a sonata and so on, he has to
remember that he is playing one of those and remember the pattern of
it. And when he is playing the first part he must play it in such a
way with the right space, time, power so that third and when he plays
the second part, the second part will be relatively neither too much
nor too little, too fast or too slow, too loud or too soft and then
when he is doing the third part he must remember the first two parts
and play the third part in such a way that the first two parts
receive their true meaning,

Now imagine in simple counterpoint, where you have only a few things
like four human voices to write for and each voice has its own
dynamics, its own tempo, own space-time-power programme and the
conductor has to listen to only four voices and he is requiring this
person to sing a little louder and this person to sing a quieter but
quicker and this person to come in with a n-i-c-e little glissando to
a certain note, but not too much, because that is bad taste, and he
must do all these things at once. Now imagine what he is doing with a
full orchestra and you can understand why there are very few, what
are called good conductors. And then imagine another being that is
conducting total reality in a block, non- serialised. He is cleverer
than Mozart.